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GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
John Stauffer
Twelve Books
History
ISBN: 9780446580090

With the hindsight that makes for history filled out and fully viewed, we can make linkages that, in their time, might not have been apparent or apropos. Such is the case with GIANTS, the linkage between two great men whose contemporaneous lives filled the stage with action, philosophy and legacy, but who, in their lifetimes, were neither close friends nor fellow travelers.

John Stauffer, a professor of English at Harvard and author of several noted history books (METEOR OF WAR: The John Brown Story, and THE BLACK HEARTS OF MEN: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race), has highlighted here the similarities between the rough-cut, self-educated Civil War president, Abraham Lincoln, and the renowned human rights autodidact, agitator, orator and editor, freed slave Frederick Douglass. Both men sought to break free from the limitations of their childhood circumstances, fought literally and figuratively for what they believed and were admired as great strategists on the battlefields they found themselves on. Both were alcohol- and tobacco-free at a time when nearly all men indulged in both habits. Both had numerous sexual liaisons, and both loved poetry. One man was tasked with uniting a nation torn apart by the onerous stigma of human slavery, and the other was charged with exhorting his people to free themselves from that stigma and rise above it. Both had some success and some notable failures.

Douglass wrote his autobiography, MY BONDAGE AND MY FREEDOM, and it is a remarkable work. Simple, articulate and honest to a painful degree, it clearly delineated what it meant to be a slave in America. A tall, strong adolescent, Douglass learned early on that even his benign masters (and there were several, possibly because he had been fathered by one of their extended family) did not shrink from sending him out to work for people with a cruel streak and a taste for torture. His benign masters were forced by the strictures of presumed white superiority to allow the young man to be flayed bloody and to defend the rights of the men who did the whipping. That a person in their care could starve, hide and wait long nights in terror rather than face another such punishment did not seem outrageous to his white owners. Douglass was smarter than many slaves and not bound by superstition. His young life reached a turning point when one overseer engaged him in a physical fight and was unable to win after four hours of continuous exertion. Though that victory did not bring release to the slave, it did instill in him the courage to overcome a master whose weakness was now obvious. He tried over and over again to escape and finally succeeded, only to face the deprivations of a runaway until he was made a free man by legal means and was able to begin a self-actualizing life at last.

With his eloquence and passion, partly learned by observing black revival preachers of the time and also liberally sprinkled with sharp humor, Douglass quickly rose to prominence in the abolitionist North and made such a reputation that when he went to call on President Lincoln, he was brought to the head of the line. As he passed forward, he heard his fellow petitioners refer to him as a simply "the nigger." For his part, Lincoln stood morally high above most men of his time in being willing to let a black man cross his threshold and converse as an equal.

Lincoln had risen from the plainest poverty, son of a backwoods family whose greatest ambitions were to become shopkeepers on what was still the frontier land of the midwest. Men made their names by being fierce and violent, by drinking and fighting one another in bouts that had no rules except the assertion of total physical dominance. Lincoln was called on to participate in one such rough and tumble, but by insisting on fair rules of "wrestling" rather than the lawlessness of the usual brawls, he emerged as a local hero. Finding himself with little talent for commerce, he chose politics as a way to earn a living and learned he had a gift for debate, combining a natural intelligence with a folksy bent for telling tales.

Like Douglass, Lincoln was not only tall, as is well known, but also physically powerful and unafraid. Like Douglass, he had to make an "escape" from the woods to the town and finally to the city, where, like Douglass, he found a constituency. The author points out that both men altered their speech patterns and accent as they rose to national recognition. Lincoln would have talked like a Shakespearean bumpkin with harsh enunciation and truncated consonants, while Douglass was very conscious of the nuance of gentlemanly speech as opposed to the sloppy patois of the slave quarters.

Lincoln showed his self-made independent temperament by accepting Douglass at the White House not once but several times. Despite Lincoln's assertion that the war was being fought not to free the slaves but to save the Union, Douglass exerted influence to gain the right of conscription of black soldiers (though at a rate of pay half that of white soldiers). Douglass was convinced that the war would bring an end to slavery and a beginning to racial parity. He was only partly right, and Lincoln was only partly successful. Douglass was welcomed by Lincoln after his immortal second inaugural address ("with malice toward none; with charity for all"), and Douglass told him his words were "a sacred effort." The two men knew that greater struggles were ahead. And though Lincoln greeted Douglass as "my friend," he knew that Douglass was one of his most vocal critics. Douglass quietly believed in Lincoln, wanted him to show himself better than he was, and mourned bitterly after the president's assassination. Douglass lived to see the nation reunited, but he also recognized that the rift caused by slavery and the unwillingness of the warring factions to enforce human rights for all would leave scars deeper than those of mere warfare.

Douglass was able to lay down his armor after the war was won, and in later years he left the battle for African American rights mostly to others. He frequently eulogized Lincoln and was once called upon to dedicate a statue depicting the late president with a grateful slave kneeling at his feet. Lincoln "as the Christ figure was more accurate than Douglass wanted to admit," Stauffer states. It was the recalcitrant South that in a few short years had overturned the policies that Lincoln had hoped would have guaranteed black male suffrage and universal citizenship to anyone born in the United States. The freed slaves had much to thank Lincoln for, and Douglass, who had once referred to Lincoln as "a genuine representative of American prejudice," made of him a martyred hero and a god. But Douglass had not become a lamb in his old age. Not long before his death, he advised a young student to "Agitate! Agitate! Agitate!"

GIANTS will satisfy with the fresh light it casts upon two towering figures in American history as they played out the roles that destiny had chosen for them --- neither fully right and both flawed, but hewn from the same tree of idealism, determination and love of their people.

--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

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